Building With Words: Poet as Architect
"[P]oetic structures have a physiological aspect—they’re offspring of the body as well as outpourings of the spirit or soul. These structures (outfitted with rhyme schemes, metrical configurations, standard forms, patterns of indentation and capitalization) are the architecture of poetry, and share with architecture a creative tension between mind and body."
—Brad Leithauser, Rhyme’s Rooms (Knopf, 2022)
Poets use diction and syntax as the core tools to write a poem, like a builder uses tools create a structure. However, if a poem is a building made of words, just as a builder needs more than only a hammer and nails, many other writing tools, like rhythm and meter, must be added to the tool kit. A poem’s lines, like beams in a building, don’t hover in the air. They rest on posts of some sort, reinforced in a foundation, consisting partly of the "theme." A poem could be built even on a single word, as long as the posts and beams that hold up that word are strong.
A poet must balance both the song of a poem and its meaning unless, of course, you intend nonsense, which is entirely valid.
When a poem calls for rhyme, by its blueprint or formal structure, diction comes clearly into play. In this case the poet must balance sound and meaning. A word might have the perfect meaning in terms of the poem’s overall effect but interrupts the poem’s song. How a poem sounds is as important as its meaning. Past US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, in The Sounds of Poetry, wrote that, "The hearing-knowledge we bring to a line of poetry is a knowledge of patterns in speech we have known to hear since we were infants." Nursery rhymes, for instance, sacrifice deep meaning and embrace the nonsensical in lieu of sound that delights and mesmerizes. A poet must balance both the song of a poem and its meaning unless, of course, you intend nonsense, which is entirely valid.
In striving for end rhymes in particular poets often sacrifice normal syntax for what might seem obtuse. Sentence structure is intentionally convoluted in a way that can come across as “trying to sound poetic.” Tending to the “song” of a poem can cause both proper diction and syntax to be compromised. However, it does not mean loss when it helps the poem move along. For example, this, by Thomas Hardy contains both useful and unnecessarily "poetic" syntax, from a modern perspective [emphasis mine].
The Blinded Bird
by Thomas Hardy
So zestfully he sings,
And warms his little wings,
And beats against the bars
Of his captivity,
As if no soul may see
Of his forlorn estate,
Who sings the soul to gate
Of his adversity.
What his song means say we:
A godlike readying
To pity them that wrong him,
To take the doom they throng him,
And never a gush of gaily
For passing injury!
All praise a spirit so zestful,
Who, strikes-bound, yet can sing.
Several syntaxial oddities stand out in this poem. He uses the word "gate" in order to rhyme with "estate" in the previous line. "Gate" is an unusual word choice (diction) to end a line. Notice the entire first stanza is one fairly complex sentence. At the end of it, the phrase— "Who sings the soul to gate/ Of his adversity./" creates an odd but acceptable sentence structure.
In Hardy’s next stanza, "What his song means say we:/" is of course another way of saying, "We say what his song means." Here I would maybe argue for the standard modern syntax as more effective — ending the line with "means," which works just as well with the next line’s ending of "…godlike readying" — rather than "say we." But this is one of the problems of reading early 20th century (and earlier) poetry. It not only challenges our sense of proper word choice, but also of our modern expected order of words.
As far as I can tell, using "gaily" as a noun had never been done before Hardy’s 1912 poem, and not since. And without a doubt "strikes-bound" is also what can be called "hapax legomenon," which means it only appears this one time in all of his work, and in fact in the entire body of 20th century literature. If we assume "strikes-bound" describes a condition ("bound by strikes"?) rather than it being an odd verb, we see he also avoids normal sentence structure by leaving out the verb "is" in the conditional clause, "Who, strikes-bound," that precedes the final words — "yet can sing."
Elon Bryant Voigt (who might be called the "Queen of Syntax") in The Art of Syntax (2009, Graywolf Press) addresses how poets, in their attempt to economize their words by saying as much as possible with few words, will create grammatically illogical structures, yet the point (hopefully a logical and deeper point) comes through. "And so adept is the brain," she writes, "in retrieving the English fundament from elaborate surfaces that natural order may be partially or even entirely reversed, "inverted" — an arrangement found not only in bad verse but some famously good poetry as well."
A point worth noting in any discussion about diction and syntax is that the last word in a line has the strongest structural weight, the best "real estate" in a poem. "Location location location," you might say. Voigt again, in her book, The Flexible Lyric: Essays on Poetry: "The final word of the line is a destination; it bears the weight of the momentum that got it there, and it establishes the launchpad for what comes next."
When a poet breaks a line after an end word, it is entirely intentional, as opposed to poetic prose, which means the word processor breaks the line depending on the number of characters it allows across the screen. A line break says to the reader, "Pay attention to the word at the end of the line before," either because it will play into a rhyme (the sound of a poem), or it completes the line’s meter (the poem’s rhythm). Or, on the other hand, it might be the poet’s intention that it’s just a word that’s needed, and it carries no weight over any other. But how a poet designs their line breaks influences both diction and syntax. And vice versa for that matter.
In this more modern example from Gwendolyn Brooks, eighty percent of the lines of this short poem end with the same word — "We." Brooks knew the importance of the last word in a line, and hearing her read it, accentuates her intention for that word in "We Real Cool."
We Real Cool
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
The choice to end every line with "We" forces enjambment and brings the reader into a shared experience with teenage pool players. The rhythm realized in the African American vernacular syntax along with its single syllable words syncopated with the end line "We" creates a jazz rhythm reminiscent of musical artists of the time, such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
When written, in 1959, "jazz" was more than just a musical genre, but a way of identifying a subculture as opposed to establishment ways of being. "To jazz someone" meant to bother them, to annoy or upset them. The final line, "Die soon" breaks the line end pattern in a palpable and tragic finality. Perfect rhyming, the rhythmic omission of standard syntax, and the consonant clusters like "Strike straight" and "Jazz June" sonically move the reader through the poem.
Paul Tran’s poem, "A Force of Nature," takes Brooks’ use of simultaneous syntax to another level. Simultaneous syntax adds the striking effect of extensive multiple meanings to a poem. Both of these poets accomplish this through orthography, specifically through line capitalization. With Brooks, the start of the sentence with the capitalized "We" followed on the next line by a capitalized active verb places those words simultaneously in the sentence, and outside of it as part of the poem’s shape. "We/ Left school. We/ Strike straight. We./" You can see how those capitalized verbal clauses at the start of each line stand alone.
A Force of Nature
BY PAUL TRAN
Mixed greens. Purple onions. Banana
Peppers. Tomatoes. Avocados. Mayonnaise. Pepper. Sourdough.
A stranger knows
Your mother’s order, has seen her
From the other side of the glass where she is always
Right and a number one
Priority. Someone asked
How she was doing, how they could help her.
Chained in whose dungeon
Were you—whose good boy were you
Pretending to be—when she said please and may and I and have
For the first time? A stranger heard
The anticipating delight
In her voice you have nearly forgotten. Do you feel that
Knife in your back
Twisting, digging in? You betrayed yourself
For nothing. In exchange for her heels shuffling, scuffing
The linoleum, rising slowly
Notice in the very first stanza, the first line mentions specific types of vegetables, ends with "Banana/" and then enjambs it with "Peppers. Tomatoes…". "Peppers" simultaneously stands alone with the second line of a more generalized list, but also as "Banana Peppers." Every stanza of this three page poem of strict tercets tumbles into the next with multiple meanings caused by the unusual (for a modern poetic style) capitalization of lines. Like in "We Real Cool," words concurrently exist both in the normal syntax of a sentence, and out of it in the poem’s shape and structure.
If we think of a poem as a structure, like a house or a building, we can ask of our poems some of the same questions we would a house or a building.
Does it have a strong foundation?
Are the walls strong enough to stand the test of time?
What about the roof? Does it leak? Is it intentionally open to the sky? Is it solid but with skylights so you can see out?
What about the inside? Is it messy? Is it Zen? Is it full of beautiful art on the walls?
The followup question to any of these is: were we intentional in our architectural choices? Answering questions like these can help us "design" better poems?
In the end, you must decide what kind of poem you want to write. Be consistent, or purposefully inconsistent, with your approach. Those choices mixed with the grit of your theme, will be your foundation.
Happy Writing!
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